‘Of course I knew what I was doing.’ Kathleen rubbed the heel of her hand under her nose, across her eyes, her head bent in exhaustion, shame. She hadn’t been able to meet Rob’s eyes since she had opened the door to him. ‘I wasn’t some foolish teenager, I was a grown woman. She was my friend, Rob, and there was little Hannah. But I put all that out of my mind, fooled myself that what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them, that it was between him and me, and no one else came into it.’ If it was details he came for, then she would give him every last gritty one. Nothing could make her feel worse than she did already.
His back to Kathleen, Rob stared out the kitchen window. His eyes, fixed on the football net at the end of the garden, were heavy and scorched, reminding him that he hadn’t slept a wink the previous night. After she had told him, after she had burst those words out like gunfire, each one striking his heart with the accuracy of a marksman, she had begged him to leave, begged him to spare her his anger, his judgement, his disappointment.
He remembered now how he had walked from the house in a stupor, allowing himself no feelings, no thoughts. He didn’t remember the drive home. But he could still feel the burn of his anger, his jealousy, the black rage that shook his hands as he tore up the house plans and slammed his fists into the table; how that same storm of rage had stalked him, hour upon hour, shadowing his every step as he paced his apartment and fought to order his thoughts. And later, in the small hours when he lay exhausted on his bed, the dead weight of loneliness that crushed his chest.
He had been right after all. He had known something had changed in Kathleen since that night he had found her in the bathroom. The spark had gone out of her. She’d been short with Jamie, with him too – especially when he mentioned anything about the new house. He had put it down to her distress over Alison and her friend’s illness, and although he didn’t like himself for it, a part of him resented Alison and her timing, resented her stealing the light from Kathleen, from both of them, and he’d had to remind himself that that very selflessness in Kathleen, that ability to put her own feelings aside to help someone else, was one of the things that set her apart, and he admired and loved it so much in her.
He had known by her tone when she said they needed to talk that it was going to be something he didn’t particularly want to hear. He had figured that she probably wanted to postpone the wedding for a bit out of respect for Alison and her circumstances, and although he was disappointed he was willing to go along with her. But he had never for one second considered that there might be a chance he would lose her.
‘Did you love him?’ His own voice sounded distant to him, foreign.
‘Then?’ Kathleen raised her head, took a deep breath. She had lost everything now, she may as well be honest with him, honest with herself for once. ‘Yes, I loved him,’ she sighed, ‘and I loved that he came to me, loved that I could fix him when no one else could, stupid and pathetic as it all might sound now.’
‘And now?’ Rob didn’t turn from the window, didn’t move his eyes from the net rippling in the goal mouth. He held his breath, his fingers turning the coins in his pocket. He knew as he showered this morning that this question was the only one that mattered, knew that his whole world hung on her answer.
‘Now my stomach turns when I think of him, of me, of what we . . . what I did.’ She stretched back her neck, closed her eyes to ease their sting. Almost eight years she had spent paying for her mistake. Eight long, hard years. Shouldn’t that have been enough? ‘It wasn’t love, or anything approaching it. I know that now.’ Her tears pressed again, hot and impatient behind her closed lids. ‘It wasn’t love, not like you’ve shown me.’ Her teeth pressed down on her lip, bit into it. She swallowed hard against her tears. ‘You’d better go, I don’t want Jamie arriving in to see . . . I’m so sorry, Rob.’ She clasped her hand over her mouth.
He turned from the window, felt her shoulders shake beneath his hands. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said, bending to kiss the crown of her head. Never again did he want to experience the utter desolation he had felt the previous night, the feeling that all the light and energy had been cut from his world. Whatever this Sean or the future would bring, they would face it together, because without her – without her smile, her laughter, her touch – without those eyes lit with love, meeting his, without that, there was nothing. ‘You’re still the woman I fell in love with.’ His arms stole around her. ‘The past is the past, Kath. This is about us now, you and me and Jamie. Nothing, no one else matters.’
* * *
Kathleen arrived at six o’clock, a large cardboard box of groceries in her arms.
‘Kathleen, you shouldn’t have.’
‘I didn’t. These are from Joan at the shop – with the message that if there’s anything you need at any time you’re just to ring and Jim will drop it up.’
‘Joan?’
‘There’s goodness in their hearts, Alison, really.’ She dropped the box on the kitchen table. ‘They care about you.’
‘I know. Look what I found on the doorstep this morning.’ Alison motioned to a basket of freshly baked scones and homemade jam on the counter. She handed the small note to Kathleen: ‘Dear Alison – Sorry for your troubles. Ye’re in my prayers. Theresa Doyle.’
‘Ah, God love her. You know, they’d drive you to drink around here, but there’s none better when you’re in a real fix.’
‘How is Maryanne? Did you see her, did you tell her . . .’ Alison hadn’t visited in over a week, not wanting to leave William’s side, not wanting Maryanne to see the state she was in.
‘Will you quit about Maryanne, she’s fine. I was in with her this morning and I told her you had a bug and you weren’t allowed to visit. Maryanne’s well taken care of and you have enough on your plate. Now, sit down and I’ll make us some coffee. How is he?’
Alison sighed and shook her head. She placed her elbows on the table, her hands supporting her chin. ‘At least he’s comfortable now and he sleeps better. But I know he hates it. Hates having trouble stringing a sentence together, being cared for. He—’ She burst into uncontrollable sobs.
‘Oh, come here.’ Kathleen gathered her in her arms and held her tightly.
‘Oh, Kathleen, I don’t even know what I’m feeling! One minute I feel totally peaceful and like I’m accepting the whole thing, and the next I just go to pieces.’
‘Come on, that’s it, let it out,’ Kathleen soothed. ‘You’re exhausted, on top of everything else. God knows when you last had a full night’s sleep. And you love him. Of course you don’t want to see him like . . . Oh Alison, I know, I know.’ Kathleen allowed her own tears to fall, knowing that the heartbreak she had felt at almost losing Rob could only be a shadow of what Alison was going through.
Alison wept like a child until it seemed she had drained every last tear from her body.
‘That’s better,’ Kathleen said, rubbing her back, ‘you needed that. And now there’s something else you need. Coffee’s off,’ she instructed, bending to the cupboard where she knew the Jameson was housed. She poured two generous measures.
‘To love!’ Kathleen raised her glass.
‘Love and friendship,’ Alison smiled, clinking hers. ‘I don’t know what I’d ever have done without you, Kathleen,’ she continued, her lip trembling. ‘Through Sean, now this, everything – you’ve always been there for me and I can never thank you enough.’ Kathleen’s smile was forced and fixed, the darkness of her secret pulling on her heart like an anchor, threatening to drown her.
When Hannah phoned two hours later, Kathleen had just left and Alison was sitting, preparing to write, in William’s lamp-lit room. She soft-stepped into the hall.
‘Not long now, Mum, I’m so excited!’
‘Me too, sweetheart, I’ll hardly know you!’ Alison fought to match the enthusiasm in her daughter’s voice. When she had taken William home, she hadn’t stopped to consider that Hannah might be home before – before the end. She had discussed it with Kathleen and they had decided to take it day by day and, as the time got nearer, Kathleen had offered, if necessary, to fly to London and meet up with Hannah a few days before she was due to return, to prepare her.
‘Ah, Mum, it’s only been three months.’
‘Sometimes it seems so much longer.’
‘I knew you’d miss me!’ The youthful energy in Hannah’s voice brought a smile to her face and underneath everything Alison could feel an excitement budding inside her at the thought of her daughter’s return.
‘And I’ll finally get to meet your man?’
‘Oh Hannah, he’s not . . . ’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve dumped him already?’
‘No, Hannah, but he’ll be leaving – I told you he was just visiting.’
‘Yeah well, tell him to hang on a little bit longer – tell him I’ve got some questions for him,’ she laughed.
‘What about you? Bet you’ll be leaving some broken hearts behind in London!’ Alison knew she couldn’t keep up the jolly pretence about William much longer and she didn’t want to break down on Hannah. ‘Oh Han, sorry to cut you short but Kathleen’s just arrived. We’re heading out and I’m not even dressed. I’ll give you a ring at the weekend, okay?’
‘Kathleen my arse!’ Hannah laughed and hung up.
* * *
‘Open it!’ A slow smile played on William’s lips as he motioned with his head to the folder he had asked Alison to collect from the camper earlier that evening. Resting the folder on her knees, she fiddled nervously with the twine binding it.
‘You know I don’t like surprises,’ she began, her eyes and mouth widening in disbelief as she opened back the cover and began leafing through the pages. The sketches were all dated. The first was a dark charcoal of Alison on the beach, the driftwood held to her breast. The next captured her leaning against the tall rock, her feet in the water. There she was standing in the moon’s beam, the water measuring her waist. Then in her dressing gown, head tilted to one side, lips parted, arms outstretched in movement; smiling, hunkered down in the heather; head thrown back in laughter at a candlelit table. It was all there. The story of her summer, the loneliness and pain of the first heavy charcoals lifting to lighter strokes, the light of the candle catching the birth of light and love in her eyes.
‘Oh, William, I . . . ’ Words wouldn’t come.
‘You like them?’ he whispered
‘It’s like . . . it’s like looking at a tape of myself – from the inside.’ She bent her head and brushed his lips. ‘Oh, William, thank you.’ She lay on the bed beside him, nestling his head to her breast.
‘It doesn’t end there. When we . . . when we first . . . made love, Alison . . . ’
She held him, waited till his words found order.
‘I knew then, felt a part of something . . . something bigger, much bigger than this world.’ His breath was short, shallow. ‘It was like I was lifted to somewhere else, somewhere beyond me . . . The place I’m going to, it’s not so far away, it’s part of here, of us.’
‘I felt it too.’ She kissed the top of his head, her fingers brushing his cheek.
‘I don’t want to leave you, Alison. I wish you . . . were coming with me.’
‘I am, in a way. And you’re not leaving me, Will. We’re part of each other. Part of each of us will live in both places.’
‘I . . . love you, Ali.’
‘And I will always love you.’ She closed her eyes and listened to his breathing, felt the warm pressure of his head melting into her aching heart.
* * *
Coffee in hand, Kathleen sat again at the kitchen table, unfolded the pages of the letter and, for what seemed the umpteenth time, she read:
Dear Alison,
I know you’ll think I’m nothing but a gutless coward for writing this and you’d be right. If I had any decency in me I would have come to you with this, in person, years ago. I can make all kinds of excuses – I can say that I didn’t want to hurt you; that you were suffering enough; that telling you would have destroyed your memory of Sean. I can say all those things and they’re all true, but I have to be brutally honest now, with you and with myself. I know I also held my tongue because of my shame. I tried to be your friend, to support you, yes because I loved you but equally to fix myself, to try to feel less of a total fraud, to ease my self-hatred. I am so sorry, Alison, for what I am about to tell you, for all the years of what you will now see as deception and false friendship. But please believe me, it was never that. I will never expect you to forgive me. All I ask is that you please try to understand and to know that my friendship and support were one hundred per cent genuine. I never intended to hurt you, but I did and I will live with the guilt and regret of that for the rest of my days.
There is no easy way of saying this, no way of softening it, so I’ll just come straight out with it. Sean was Jamie’s dad. The man I told you about, who already had a family of his own, it was Sean. Your Sean. I loved him, Alison – at least I thought I did and through those short months that it lasted before Jamie was conceived I tried to persuade myself that he loved me too and that somehow you and Hannah wouldn’t get hurt. I woke up fairly sharply when I discovered I was pregnant. When I told him, he was out of control with rage. He loved you so much and he despised me for having put your marriage in jeopardy. I hope it will be some comfort to you to know that, after all, I was nothing to him. He never cared for me and that has been my punishment, to have that driven home so cruelly to me. It was always you. You and Hannah.
Remember the day I wheeled Jamie to your house shortly after he was born? I still loved him, Alison, and I thought that when he saw his son he would soften. But he never even looked at Jamie, just snatched Hannah up and left the room. I finally got the message loud and clear and I steeled myself to forget about him, to put all my energies into Jamie. And I vowed that Sean wasn’t going to break our friendship. I was going to make it up to you, make everything as right as I could. I was damned if I was going to be broken by him.
I counted on him feeling guilty as he watched Jamie grow but he would pass us in the street like we were strangers. As time went by my resentment grew. God, I was so bitter! And that led to me making my next big mistake. About six weeks before Sean went missing I called him, told him that either he acknowledge Jamie and tell you the truth or I would tell you myself. And now you know the guilt I have been carrying for the last three years. I thought he had done it because of the pressure I had put him under. I believed I had taken him from you again, only this time so absolutely. But I should have known better. I should have known the real Sean Delaney.
I know you won’t be able to stand the sight of my face after reading this but I want to ask you please to meet me one last time. There is something vital (and I use that word for good reason) about Sean’s disappearance that you have to know. I have no real proof but I know I’m right. I’m not prepared to put it in a letter but it’s something you need to know right now. Please try to put aside your anger just for an hour, that’s all I ask. You need to hear this, Alison. Please, I’m begging you, just hear me out.
Kathleen.
She dropped the pages to the table, rubbed her tired eyes, checked her watch. It was 1 a.m. How many drafts had she written since Rob had finally convinced her that this was something she absolutely had to do? Rob had been lying in the back garden the previous evening when she had come back from Alison’s. She had stumbled out onto the patio, near hysterical under the weight of her secrets: the scalding guilt as she had tried to console Alison, the depth of Alison’s gratitude – and then meeting Joe on the way home. She had stopped to pick up milk and Joe was sitting eating an ice cream on the shop windowsill. Although the evening was warm, there was nothing unusual in seeing Joe with a hat on, that corduroy number never left the side of his head, at least until now. Her heart literally stopped as she walked up to him and saw the black knitted hat, the stitching on the tail of the dolphin motif missing. There was no mistaking that hat and she remembered so well how Alison had described it to the guards when she was detailing what Sean was wearing the night he went missing. When she’d asked Joe where he got it and he told her he’d found it on the floor of the van belonging to the man ‘that stole Seany’s gear’, her legs had barely carried her to the car. The bastard! He was alive! And he had bought all his own fishing gear back, made all that pretence of sending that guy Tom from Donegal to fetch it!
Rob had pressed the brandy glass into her shaking hands, had urged her to drink, to breathe, to talk to him. She’d seen his eyes fight to check his anger as she recounted again that telephone call at Alison’s, how her gut had told her it was Sean Delaney at the other end. Rob had pleaded and persuaded, convinced her that despite what Alison was going through with William, she had to be told and told now. Told everything before Sean turned up on her doorstep. Dear Rob, he had even tried to persuade her to let him go with her to Alison’s right there and then. She had sobbed uncontrollably, hating herself, her guilt, knowing that the moment she had dreaded for so many years had finally arrived. She would have to tell Alison and yet she knew that she would never in a million years – not even if Sean Delaney was standing there right in front of her – be able to stand herself in front of Alison and watch her face, watch her whole body crumble as the words of her so-called ‘friend’ struck, stabbed and shredded her to pieces. The letter seemed her only real option, the option of a coward she despised, but she knew it would be the very most and the very best she was capable of.
She folded the pages now, slotted them into the envelope. She wasn’t happy with it, knew even if she sat and rewrote it another hundred times she would never be happy with it. How could Alison, how could anyone ever understand, ever forgive what she had done? Nobody had lived in her heart then, nobody would ever know how much she had adored that man, how she would have given her very life for him.
She wiped a silent tear from her cheek, pressed her wet finger to the seal of the envelope. Although writing the letter, confessing, was the hardest and most humiliating thing she had ever had to do, it had brought her a kind of peace that she had not known since that very first night Sean Delaney had come to her bed. Nobody else might be able to see things from her point of view, to ever understand, but writing the letter she had finally allowed herself to look at who she was, who she had been then. And for the very first time she had felt a little understanding for herself, a little compassion hidden in the darkness below the shame and the guilt. Yes, what she had done was wrong. It was foolish, selfish, stupid – all those things – but she hadn’t done it with any malice or ill-intent. Her crime had been falling in love with someone she shouldn’t have and allowing that love to blind her to all sense and reason. Rob understood her. Rob forgave her. Maybe it was time she learned to forgive herself.
She slipped her jacket from the back of the chair, fished in the pocket for her car keys. When Alison awoke in the morning, the letter would be there in the hall, waiting for her. She took a deep breath and stepped out into the night.
* * *
Alison awoke with a start, William’s arms tight around her, his body spooned to hers. The bed, the whole room was like a hothouse. Careful not to disturb his precious and hard-got sleep, she kissed his hand and, ever so gently moving his arm from around her, she slipped out of the bed and opened the window. All was so dark: so dark and quiet and still. Was that what William was heading towards – no light, no sound, just nothing? A shiver coursed her naked body and she hugged her arms about herself. She licked her lips; her mouth felt so dry. Bending to retrieve her robe from the floor, the silence was suddenly torn open by the gun-burst of gravel disturbed on the drive. A visitor, at this hour? Her mind quickly sprang back to the night of Sean’s disappearance and she swallowed against the dryness in her mouth. She fought in the darkness to find the sleeve of her robe, finally forcing her arm in past the belt in her hurry from the room.
The sensor light above the front door shone on the back of Kathleen’s car moving swiftly down the drive. Kathleen? She turned on the hall light and checked her watch. Almost 2 a.m. Maryanne! Oh Jesus! Kathleen had obviously been on the nightshift and . . .
Then her eyes fell on the fat buff envelope on the floor at her feet. Brow creased, she bent towards it, the slant of Kathleen’s hand calling her name from its face.